Term Paper Spiritual Man Part Two

Please keep in mind that this and all the studies contained within this website are my own personal studies, they do not necessarily represent my Church's views or my Pastors'... Be blessed!

This study is part two of three. Please keep going and finish this and part three! You will learn a lot but not without a cost (time). Forgive the textual formatting (or lack thereof) but to condense this sizeable paper I chose to serve just the meat, but if you do take the time to read it I'll guarantee you that you'll be blessed by it! Please feel free to print, modify, or copy as necessary to facilitate reading! God bless! Ricky D.

Port Harcourt, Nigeria

May 20th, 1998

Term Paper:

THE SPIRITUAL MAN, Part II

Book by: Watchman Nee Study by: Richard P. Duffield

Once again I enter onto the road of trying to express in words what this wonderful undertaking by Watchman Nee has imparted into my life. I’ll proceed using the "outline" form to express same that it might benefit other readers which may happen across this term paper. We must begin with the basic fact that this second book is in fact building on the truths revealed in the first and reveals more details about our spiritual condition and the things we can and must do to keep maturing in our walk with God. We must always keep foremost in our minds that we are on a journey that will not be completed while we’re in this flesh, however this journey as outlined in Romans 8:29 is conforming us to the image of Jesus Christ and we are held accountable for the part we play which principally is our obedience to God’s leading and our willingness to submit to His ultimate plan for us whether it seems good to us or not. The preceding verse, Romans 8:28 assures the believer that all things work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to His purpose! God’s Word says all, not part or some, all! One of the main issues here comes from the level of trust we’ve developed in God and are willing to develop! However, lets get back for now to the teaching as per the text and begin with this basic truth, as the first book made clear, a man is comprised of 3 parts, the spirit, the soul, and the body. After the fall of man through Adam’s sin, the soul took up the position which God had intended for the spirit to occupy, that of being in complete control of the other two parts. When we are born again or regenerated, we again return to the original position whereby the spirit is ruler over the body and soul, therein lies the problem of our soul’s not wanting to relinquish the position it has occupied since birth. In fact the spirit and the soul of the unregenerated man has become fused as it were into one, even after we’ve been regenerated, this condition continues mainly due to the believer’s ignorance to God’s Word and the soul’s ability to deceive us through our emotions into thinking many things which we experience are spiritual. Not getting ahead of myself I will regress and quote the author in saying, "God’s children must be very humble before God and seek to know the teaching of the Bible and the functioning of the spirit through the Holy Spirit in order that they may walk by the spirit." We can ascertain that once born again we are indwelt by God’s Holy Spirit and that is an immutable fact, our choice now becomes whether or not we will humble ourselves before such glorious light, learn to respect such a Holy Presence, and allow Him to work in and through us to conform us to the image of our Lord Jesus! Faith in Christ makes one a regenerated believer, obedience to the Holy Spirit makes him a spiritual believer. Except the regenerated believer know in the depth of their being that God’s Holy Spirit is indwelling them and unless with their spirit they wait for His teaching, they will not welcome His operation upon their soul life. Only as they cease to seek anything by themselves and only as they take the position of the teachable shall they be taught by the Spirit truth which they will be able to digest. As we acknowledge Him and respect Him, He manifests His power out from the hidden part of our being by extending His life to our soulical and conscious life. We could say that to be truly spiritual is to wholly belong to the Holy Spirit. It is His work to bring man to spirituality. The hindrance that we all face in becoming mature spiritually is our flesh. In order to mature we must learn to resist the flesh in all things, denying its activity, power, and opinion. As mentioned above, we are upon regeneration governed by a spirit that to some degree or another is fused to our soul and to distinguish between the two is very difficult, in fact impossible if we do not use God’s Word as the standard to differentiate same. We must take into account that all things that are of the spirit must come from within, they are not governed by things from without as the soul is... The spirit is led by the intuition, that covered in the first book, the soul can as well manifest itself through deception from what appears as to be within but the spirit will always lead without regard to external stimuli. More on the soul’s deceptive nature later... Knowing that God’s Holy Spirit indwells us is in fact the first and foremost necessity in our becoming able to overcome our carnal condition. We must know and understand perfectly and absolutely by faith that He abides in us! This knowledge must become experiential! When this knowledge becomes experiential, then we can commit ourselves without reservation to Him for renewal and submit every part of our soul and body to His correction. Having said that, we must also walk in spiritual power, not weakness, said power coming from God’s Spirit. Whether we are weak or powerful in our spirit depends on whether on not we’ve received His strengthening, the same that the Apostle Paul prayed for the Ephesians to receive in his epistle to them, chapter 3, verse 16. To obtain this power from on high we must yield specifically to the Lord, forsake every doubtful aspect of our life, be willing to obey God’s will fully, and believe through prayer that He will flood our spirit with His power. All obstacles on our part must be removed, our submission to His will must be complete, then the strengthening can and will occur! Prayer is the acid test of the inner man’s strength. A strong spirit is capable of praying much and praying with all perseverance until an answer comes, a vigorous spirit can move forward in the midst of adverse environment or feeling. As man’s inner man (spirit) is energized, it’s intuitive power is increased, our spirit senses God’s movement however small it might be and we react accordingly. The end result of our spirit being filled with God’s power is to afford it full sway over soul and body. Every thought, desire, sensation and intent is now governed by the spirit. The soul can no longer act independently, it becomes instead the spirit’s steward. We can now see that it is possible to live by the spirit and walk in the spirit if we are empowered by the Spirit of God. We need to understand that the transformation from soulish Christian to spiritual Christian is not necessarily a permanent condition, in fact it is best to realize that it can quickly revert to soulish given the opportunity! We must ever be vigilant and stay watchful at all times. To live in the spirit means to walk according to intuition. It is to have one’s life, service, and action in the spirit, ever being governed and empowered by it. We must walk according to the guidance accorded us through our intuition. The Holy Spirit expresses His feeling through our spirit’s delicate sense in our innermost depths. The truly spiritual man retains his will, yet it, as with his emotion, mind, and volition is no longer independent of God as previously but now decides according to the dictate of the spirit, having abandoned self as it’s center. His body as well follows suit, no longer enticing the soul into sin by its passions and lusts as it formally did. Instead the body of the spiritual man now answers swiftly the directions of the spirit. The spirit of a spiritual man has grown strong as per Paul’s prayer and now the body and soul is under its power. Every member of his body has become an instrument of righteousness, the whole man is governed by the inner man, all the organs of his being are completely subject to it, absolute allegiance is rendered to it. A spiritual man lives by the spirit... Realizing that to fully expound on this rich work by Watchman Nee it would take far too many words and pages, I’ll condense this outline to clarify the following areas, 1. Prayer & warfare, 2. Analysis of the spirit (intuition, communion, and conscience) , 3. Laws of the spirit, 4. Analysis of the soul, emotion, affection, desire, feeling and faith). Under the first topic of prayer and warfare, we must understand that unspiritual prayers can yield no fruit! Prayer in effect is man uttering to God what is God’s will, no mixing of man’s will in God’s work is possible, true prayer in fact uncovers the emptiness in the petitioner but the fullness of the Petitioned. What a believer has to do is discern in his intuition the will of God and pray according to it! He must never exceed the burden God has given us, anything more than what the intuition makes known to us originates from us and is therefore of the flesh. In acknowledging our total weakness, we then are able to depend on the movement of the Holy Spirit within our spirit for uttering His prayer... A couple other pertinent points are that true prayer must originate from the throne of God, it is initially sensed in one’s spirit, next understood by his mind, and finally uttered through the power of the Spirit. Negligence in prayer withers the inner man, there is no substitute for prayer! A believer’s spiritual efficiency is greatly increased by the believer praying often with his spirit, only this type of prayer is truly effectual. All can be summed up by this, if a believer fails in prayer, he fails in fact in everything! Regarding warfare, we find that a believer can receive instructions from the Bible, however his understanding is limited to his mind, he still lacks spiritual revelation until he receives the Baptism in the Holy Spirit, this Spirit Baptism really marks the starting point of the believer’s spiritual warfare. By this Baptism, the believer not only touches and receives the supernatural power of God but also contacts God’s Person as well! Only after the inner man is strengthened by the Holy Spirit’s Baptism can we know how to and have power to wrestle with our adversary! We find that once baptized in the Spirit, we enter into the supernatural realm, at this critical stage of our growth, unless the believer fully realizes his total weakness apart from God, he can and almost certainly will fall into deception! As stated previously, deception leads into a downward spiral towards destruction! Without going into too much detail, suffice to say that no matter what we feel or sense, unless it matches God’s Word, it is not of God! God cannot and will not do anything contrary to His Word! Many are the deceptions we can and do fall into, we must read, study, feast on God’s Word continuously in order to know what it has to say about each circumstance in which we enter! Really important is to follow our conscience and intuition in all matters as they line up with God’s Word! Satan can and does deceive many through experiences which appear to be quite spiritual, we must remember that he is in fact a spiritual being, albeit an evil one! In concluding this short summary about prayer and spiritual warfare , let me add that we must be zealous for God, relentlessly attacking the enemy and never allowing this most useful spirit of ours to sink into passivity! Going on into point number two, we will take a brief analytical look at our spirit and the parts which it is comprised of. In order to walk in or by the spirit I’d think it’s fair to say that we must understand clearly as much as possible about it! We should never fear appropriating too much knowledge concerning the spirit but we should be extremely apprehensive if we use our mind extensively in such pursuit. Many can wrongly interpret their own feelings or thoughts to be functions of the spirit, hence we see the importance for every believer to have a clear understanding of the spirit and it’s functions in order to move according to it! As previously mentioned, the spirit is comprised of 3 main parts, each are known to us today because of their various manifestations in us... Intuition is the first part we’ll look at, as we’ve said, God makes His will known to the believer through this spiritual sense. This sense is only achieved by believers once his spirit has been empowered by the Holy Spirit, his inner man hence being strengthened, this sense comes alive and is manifested to make God’s will known to us in order that we may walk in it. Not wanting to sound redundant, let me again make the point that intuition works in a straight manner, it comes forth directly, without reason or cause, I mean it is not affected or caused by outside stimuli. This sense emerges directly from within man, from deep within it comes forth! Because the Holy Spirit dwells in our spirit which is at the center of our being, His thoughts, expressed through our intuition, must arise from that innermost region and very often they are completely opposed to our mind’s reasoning... (His ways are higher than our ways, His thoughts are higher than our thoughts... Is. 55:8,9) It is therefore necessary for us to see that whatever is God’s must flow from the depths of man and is directly opposed to that of Satan which must flow from outside in... The difference being great however we must learn to know and understand where our feelings originate from, from the inner (spirit) man, or the outer (soul) man... Having said that, lets make another point clear, knowing and understanding are not the same! The mind understands, the spirit knows! The believer "knows" the things of God through his intuition. Knowing therefore is one of the tasks of the intuition! The Holy Spirit enables our spirit to know, our spirit instructs our mind to understand. So we can see that it is possible to know something without understanding, we are often led to act upon something we "know" God is telling us to do before we ever understand why we should. Intuition possesses the inherent ability to discern God’s movement and its meaning, thereby being our teacher for all practical purposes where spiritual matters are concerned. The Anointing of God operates in man’s spirit to enable intuition to know His thoughts. By seeing all of the above we can understand that the intuition in itself is capable of distinguishing good from evil, Christ from antichrist, without any assistance from the mind’s observation and or investigation. With all diligence we must be made to follow the still small voice that comes from our intuition above any other (of course once it aligns with the Word of God) and we’ll not be deceived as so many today are! As Jesus spoke while He walked on earth, according to what He intuitively knew, so we should strive to accomplish. This should be the normal condition of every spiritual person. Our spirit indwelt by the Holy Spirit is free to work and filled with the power of knowledge, it can exercise control over our whole being. Thus boldly stating the above, we must see that we must receive these things from our intuition through the process of revelation. A good definition of revelation is the means by which the Holy Spirit enables a believer to apprehend a particular matter by indicating the reality of it to his spirit. That’s revelation. Therefore we can establish the fact that there is but one kind of knowledge concerning either the Bible or God which is valuable, and that is the truth revealed to our spirit by God’s Spirit through revelation! Please note that revelation happens in the intuition, quietly, neither hastily or slowly, (always on time) and soundlessly yet with a message, said message being from the throne room of God Himself! Revelation in the spirit alone gives one true knowledge of God. Having made the above case, we can ascertain that nothing is of any spiritual benefit to the believer unless it flows from revelation in the intuition, God reveals Himself solely to man’s spirit! We should consider that there are two main kinds of revelations, the direct and the sought. The direct is where God, having a particular wish for the believer to do, draws near and reveals it to the believer’s spirit. The sought is whereby the believer has a need and approaches God through prayer then waits for God’s answer in his spirit. Obviously there are more types of revelations, let us not limit God or His ability to reveal His will to us through revelation, but the above stated are the ones most frequently encountered in our walk with God. The revelation received most frequently by young believers is the sought type, while the mature believers more often receive the direct type. Why, because the longer we walk with Christ, the more we experientially know His will and the more we accept the things He decides we need and the less we make demands on Him as such. Everyone who walks intimately with God, enjoying secret communion and spiritual union, will receive God’s revelation in his intuition and know unmistakably what he should do. God must instruct us throughout our lifetime in order to make us realize that apart from following the spirit’s intuition everything else is in vain. Next we will address the part of our spirit called communion, or maybe we should say the action of communication ... We communicate with the material world with or through the body, we communicate with the spiritual world through the spirit, or more specifically through the spirit’s intuitive faculty. It is here and here alone where we are able to communicate with God, we’ve spoken about this in the first paper and suffice to say that only spirit can communicate with God’s Spirit, there is no other way, flesh cannot achieve these ends! (John 9:31) Not to be redundant, but we may have a form of worship or feel that we are in touch with and or communicating with God but if we’ve not experienced rebirth or better put regeneration, it is simply not possible! And once again, our fellowship with Him is from deep within, the deepest place in our entire being in fact, it is in our spirit through our intuition. We can only employ spiritual means to achieve spiritual ends. Whatever is performed through our thoughts, talents, or methods are accounted by God as dead! Including worship and communication with Him! Our natural endowments are utterly inadequate, therefore God in His glorious wisdom created the wonderful plan of redemption and has given us His Spirit to communicate with and through us by means of our spirit! He even gives us utterances that we cannot understand to further confound the wise... (Romans 8:26, Acts 2:4, etc...) All this tells us once again that the only way to apprehend God is by intuition, and if our intuition is responsive, we will know the mind of God and there is no limit to the Christian’s knowledge if he has a sensitive intuition. Our communication, as previously stated is through our intuition and the voice of our spirit is usually very soft, easy to miss if we are not attentively listening without a zillion distractions! There is but one way to achieve this attentiveness and freedom from distractions, that is from developing our intuition through exercise as we mature in our walk with God. Gradually but continuously subjecting our flesh to the power of the cross, spending time with God, studying His Word, actively seeking to hear His voice in our intuition causes it to wax stronger, only through such exercise can we develop and strengthen our intuition whereby real spiritual advancement is measured. Having so matured now we must communicate what we receive through revelation in our intuition to others! We must transform what we’ve received from God into milk and serve it freely to the babes in Christ! What comes from God’s Holy Spirit enters our spirit and what we receive in our spirit can then enter the spirit of others. In recapping, let me not forget to mention that God grants us wisdom as well as revelation, both are received through our intuition into our spirit and both are very necessary for our communication with God. This shouldn’t be new to us as we must all agree that God’s disclosures to us are always those of wisdom! We need this wisdom for many reasons, one of the biggest is to discern what is good and what is evil. We should always pray for God’s wisdom, James tells us such in 1:5 of his epistle and who is it that thinks he has enough wisdom? This wisdom is always given through revelation, into our spirits through our intuition! Spiritual advancement is measured by faithful obedience, through obedience we yield to His will and His leading in our life and we grow and become more and more conformed to His image! In ending this section I’ll finish with this thought, our spirit’s relationship with God is the foundation for pleasing Him and bearing fruit, for He is pleased with nothing but His own will! Each true communion we have with God trains us to commune better the next time! We should seek to be perfect, accordingly we must seize every opportunity to train our spirit as such to know God better. Besides the functions of intuition and communion, as previously stated, our spirit performs another important task, that of correcting and reprimanding so as to render us uneasy when we fall short of the glory of God. This ability and attribute of the spirit is called conscience. Conscience is where God expresses His holiness. If we desire to follow the spirit, (since we’ll never reach a stage of infallibility), we must heed what out inward monitor (conscience) tells us both regarding inclination and overt action! We should know through our spirit that before we take any step, even while still considering same, our conscience together with our intuition will protest immediately and make us uneasy at any thought or inclination which is displeasing to the Holy Spirit. (That’s why we must learn to develop and follow our spirit through our intuition!) For the sake of shortening this already lengthy paper, I’ll add only a few important facts about this function of the spirit. Conscience was inherently designed by God and placed into man and when Adam sinned, this function was put into a "comatose" state, while we are dead in our intuition and communion with God, this function of the spirit still exists and still functions albeit not as it was designed to function. The conscience’s ability to distinguish good and evil was in fact increased, and it is here that the Holy Spirit first awakens from it’s comatose state when initiating His work of salvation. We can clearly see that the Holy Spirit illuminates the sinner’s conscience with the light of God’s law to convict him of sin, and also enlightens man’s conscience with the light of the gospel so as to save him. Conscience condemns the sinner and the proof of salvation is the quieting of it’s voice of condemnation. Once quieted and cleansed by the Lord’s precious blood, it becomes possible for the intuition of the spirit to serve God. Conscience and intuition are inseparable! If a child of God desires to be filled with the Spirit, to be sanctified, and lead a life wholly after God’s will, he must adhere to the voice of conscience. Being faithful towards the voice of one’s conscience is the first step towards sanctification. Following it’s voice is truly a sign of true spirituality! Whenever our conscience condemns us, let us repent immediately because whatever it condemns is condemned by God! A very prominent truth regarding conscience is that it never reasons or argues, it simply discerns God’s will through intuition and condemns everything that is not according to Him, simply put, it demands our obedience. Humbly and quietly and obediently the mature Christian should permit their conscience to reprove and condemn them of each and every individual sin, and as such eliminate everything which is contrary of God. Conscience can be described as a window too the believer’s heart, if he is unable to follow his conscience wholly, he is in effect disqualified to walk after the spirit. The more spiritual a believer is the more keenly he follows after his conscience’s voice, for every time a believer does not listen to conscience he damages his spiritual walk! Intuition leads believers while conscience constrains them to follow their intuition. A clear conscience allows us to communicate with God boldly whereas a murky conscience makes us loose our boldness and our communion suffers as a result. We must never depart even for a moment from the blood which continuously and forever cleanses us and keeps our conscience clear. Conscience is our organ of faith, with it clear and void of offense in our life, we can grow in faith and confidence. Whatever it condemns must be confessed immediately, cleansed by the precious blood and forsaken, that with all boldness we can enter into communion with God and thereby grow in faith and maturity. Conscience is closely related to knowledge, spiritual knowledge, because conscience can only convict us according to the level of the light it has received. As the knowledge of a believer increases, so his conscience increases in consciousness, the more it’s consciousness advances, the more it judges. Christ alone is our single standard of holiness, as we grow more like Him so our conscience grows and helps us to become even more like Him. God expects His children to obey Him according to what they’ve already learned, we should not compare ourselves to others or try to live in the light that others do, it over extends us and is not the way God intends it to be. The absolute will of God is always the same, but He reveals His mind to each person according to the limitation of their spiritual position. The bottom line is this, the conscience serves as a monitor for God, it is the standard of God’s leading and whatever conscience judges, so God judges. It is here that God judges the motives, He is more interested in obedience than "correctness" and thus being the fact, we need to heed conscience carefully and upon knowing God’s will through it, act swiftly and obediently in executing God’s will! We care therefore say that the level of our spirituality is directly measured by the sensitivity to our conscience. We’ll try to keep point three brief but not because it isn’t important, the laws of the spirit could possibly be the most important part of this book but we must endeavor to lessen the legthliness of this outline and here is where the ax will fall... Alot of this section will be included in the closing of this paper where I’ll show how this book has affected my life. In fact most of this section is covered in Part 1 and throughout the various sections already covered and to be covered in the fourth section. We can find four conditions which our spirit may encounter and those being: 1. The spirit is oppressed and is therefore in decline, 2. The spirit is under compulsion and so is forced into inordinate activity, 3. The spirit is defiled since it has yielded ground to sin, 4. The spirit is quiet and firm because it occupies it’s rightful position. A Christian can keep his spirit in it’s rightful position by heeding every word, movement, and sense in his inner man carefully, by so doing sharpening his spiritual consciousness whereby God can make His will known at all times. The believer needs to guard his spirit carefully so as to insure it against all disturbances both from Satan and his own self life and to assure a peaceful communion with God. If a Christian wishes to walk after the spirit he has to discern exactly what condition his spirit is in and learn how to uplift an oppressed spirit, exercise his will to prevent his spirit from becoming overly active or restore it to normalcy if it is too active, and how to cleanse a defiled spirit that it may work together with God once again. The book gives us more details on how most of the above is accomplished however our intuition through revelation from God and our conscience can direct us through God’s written Word to effect said changes that our spirit may assume it’s God given proper position. We can also see in this section that our mind does play an important part in our spiritual growth, it is the place where we obtain light, the Spirit of God dispenses light to our minds though our spirits. Surely we cannot trust in the mind in itself for whatever is not of the spirit is unfit for spiritual things as the mind is of the soul, however, a mind under the dictates of the spirit is quite necessary for the mature believer! The mind is to assist the spirit, it helps us to pray when we are dry, it begins and the spirit takes over when we’re led by the spirit. Such mental activity will eventually incite our spirit to move! Yet as soon as the spirit joins in we can and must discharge all burdens immediately to it. The principle is as such, in the beginning we should exercise our spiritual sense to apprehend God given knowledge, but afterwards we must keep and use this knowledge by means of the mind. Whatever is obtained in the spirit must be preserved and employed by the mind. We must exercise our minds for the sole purpose of inciting the spirit to work, the mind sets into motion what the spirit will soon carry forward by itself, it is never a substitute for the spirit, merely a means to activate the spirit. Inferior though it be to the spirit, the mind nonetheless can assist it. We must remember it is our battlefield with Satan however if led by the spirit, it can be terribly apprehensive of interference and can immediately recognize the tricks and deceptions of the enemy. This state of preparedness can only come by walking as outlined above, in constant communion with God, being led by the spirit, through our conscience and revelations received by our intuition. Nevertheless we can ascertain that the mind is of utmost importance to us if kept in it’s proper position and condition! This brings me to the last point which I wish to bring forth about the spirit before going on to analyze the soul and that is the list of spiritual states which the Bible describes, all of which we need to develop within us, necessary attributes of a fully matured believer, together which causes us to be Christ-like, those being: a. contrite spirit, b. broken spirit, c. afflicted spirit, d. lowly spirit, e. poor in spirit, f. fervent spirit, g. cool spirit, h. joyful spirit, i. quiet spirit, j. newness of spirit, k. holy spirit, l. strong spirit, j. one spirit, k. full of grace spirit, l. rapture spirit. The text elaborates on each of the above spiritual attributes, all I’ll say is that we must incorporate them into our life to fully please God. Each one is important and equally necessary whereas all together they make up the spiritual man. Let me end this section by stating that we need to have a spirit of power towards the enemy, a spirit of love towards man, and a spirit of self control towards ourselves, such makes the spiritual man! Having finally arrived at the last part of the proposed outline, I hope to do the subject justice without going into too much detail as many things about the soul has been covered in the first Term Paper and I feel it’s better to focus on the things that are positive. However it is my intention that the reader would not be ignorant and as such we’ll begin... The soul most certainly can be described as the biggest hindrance to a believer’s growth if it is not in a right relationship (subservient) to the spirit! The biggest problem being emotion, whereby almost all practices of the soulish originate. You see, even though a Christian has experienced deliverance from sin, he can remain soulish, or powerless to overcome the natural life, unless he experiences a deeper work of the cross in his life wrought by the Holy Spirit. Within the soulish realm, there are three main groups we can see that most hinder our growth spiritually, those being: 1. affection, 2. desire, and 3. feeling. The emotion is very much governed by circumstances, external stimuli, it is easily changed, it is essentially reactionary in nature, totally without principle. If however, the believer by the power of the Holy Spirit allows his emotional life to be crucified and accepts the Holy Spirit as Lord over all things, he can avoid this reactionary, alternating type of existence! Often confused is the difference between inspiration and emotion, actually they are easily differentiated, at least in principle. Emotion always enters man’s outside, whereas inspiration originates with the Holy Spirit in man’s spirit. Inspiration is totally opposite of emotion, God’s Spirit alone inspires, and since He dwells in the human spirit, inspiration must come from within! Emotion is truly can be an enemy to our spiritual life, again, unless it occupies it’s proper position within out being. A quality that characterizes a spiritual person is the great calm he maintains under any circumstance, he cannot easily be moved, because he has yielded his emotion to the cross and his will and spirit are permeated with the power of the Holy Spirit. Whoever genuinely desires to be spiritually mature must allow the cross to cut deeper into his emotion! We should realize that God will not lead anyone who is in emotional turmoil, we must learn to wait on Him as we allow our emotional turmoil to subside and not make any decisions while in such a state, these times can and do come into our lives, when they do we must wait. At such a time our mind as well as conscience can become undependable or better stated unreliable, this is when we can easily be deceived, it behooves us to wait on the roaring seas to calm and then act on God’s still small voice in our intuition! At such times we must exercise our will to resist making decisions that are from our soulish nature! Emotions can hinder us in many ways, but if we permit the cross to operate deeply upon them we shall find afterwards that they no longer obstruct, but rather cooperate with our spirit. The cross after having dealt with the emotions has renewed them and has made them a channel for the spirit to work through. If in the proper position the emotions will love or hate exactly as God would! They will be our inner man’s means of expression. In committing our soul to the cross, we must remember that what is lost is the soul life, not its function, were it actually nailed to the cross we would no longer think, choose, or feel! Emotions must go to the cross, the cross aims to accord the spirit authority to rule over every activity of the emotion. To truly loose our soul life, we must doggedly, resolutely, and continuously deny the natural power and walk exclusively by the power of God, it means to no longer live after self and its desires but to submit unexceptionally to the will of God. I’ll try to briefly skip through the other parts of the soul and hopefully pull out the true wheat from the chaff! Affection is a matter of utmost concern for our Lord, He desires it to be wholly directed towards Him, not partially or even mostly, but fully given over to Him! In order to be sanctified, we must first be consecrated to the Lord and first and foremost in our consecration we must love our Lord with all our heart, all our soul, and all our mind.(Matt. 22:37) God desires and demands that we give Him all our love, and such being the case, our affections are primary in our pleasing Him. In order to give our absolute love to God as He demands, our soul life must receive a fatal blow! God calls for all, He is a jealous God when our affections are concerned! (Ex. 20:5!) Our means of achieving spiritual power in fact hinges on the amount we are willing to allow God to Lord over our affections! This is one area where most Christians have difficulty, children, cherished loved ones, all sorts of people and or things demand and battle for our affection! However, if our heart is sincere in consecration, God can and will deprive us of everything so that He is the only One left. To possess spiritual life, in reality, we must be willing to forsake all we love! Whatever conflicts with our love to God, God demands us to forsake! Spiritual life forbids the dividing of our affections. Now lets look at this truth, even our love for God if coming from self is defiled! Loving God with one’s soul power is not welcomed by God. This too, our love for God, must originate from our inner man, our spirit! Mainly we can see the difference with spiritual love and soulish because of "hooks" and demands attached. If we love God for any other reason than for who He is, in the best or worst circumstances, we can see that this love is soulish in nature. We must love God for His sake, not for what we can get from Him! We need to fellowship with His Spirit and develop His nature and love as He does, we need in fact to allow His Spirit to love through our spirit! There is so much more in the book about this but I must move on, the next part of the soul is desire... This critter occupies the largest part of our emotional life and joins forces with our will to rebel against God! Before we are regenerated, desire unites with sin and makes us love sin! Once regenerated desires still seeks to control us through our emotion! All natural desires are linked with self life! Pride springs from desire! Ambition comes from desire, and however good or praiseworthy our walk and or labor may be, if they arise out of ambition, they come from emotions, which are soulish, and henceforth judged by God as wood, hay, and stubble! When a person accepts the demand of the cross in consigning his soulish emotion to death that he may live utterly for the Lord, he will discover experientially how his emotion pleads and maneuvers for just a little ground of activity! A Christian must remember that in spiritual affairs nothing is too small to hinder his progress! Hastiness is another symptom of an emotional Christian, he finds it hard to wait on God and rarely heeds the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Haste is clearly a work of the flesh. Self justification is another tell tale characteristic of the emotional believer. God wants His people to commit all matters into His hand and not defend themselves! Self pity, self glory, self importance, self love, self delight, are all attributes of emotionalism. The spirit life commences with God and finds in Him its all sufficiency! If a believer walks according to his personal aspirations he cannot avoid being rebellious towards God. Our Lord’s aim is to destroy absolutely the believer’s craving for anything besides Himself! God longs for His will (made known to the believer in his intuition) to be the guiding principle for all our life and labor! God charges us to break completely with our longings for anything other than Himself! If anyone wishes to maintain a true spiritual course and walk he must fully cooperate with God in putting to death his own desire! All interests, inclinations, and preferences must be denied, and step by step, God leads and empowers us to completely deny our soul life! After a person has forsaken and crucified his natural longings he obtains a genuinely satisfied and fulfilled life. His desire is fulfilled completely in God’s sufficiency. God has filled his desire, his emotion is at rest because he covets nothing outside of Him, he delights only in what God delights in, he no longer resists but rather welcomes whatever God purposes for him, whether bitter or sweet. All the above from beginning to end is the life of faith. Without faith it is impossible to please God, to live for the Lord is to reserve nothing for self but to deliver it willingly to death . He who is able to accept everything gladly from the Lord, including darkness, dryness, flatness, and completely disregard self is he who lives for Him through faith. You see emotion begins to doubt when it senses blackness, whereas faith holds on to God even in the face of death. Today’s crying need is for believers to hand themselves over completely to God and ignore all their feeling! In becoming spiritual we abandon the old desire for self pleasure and hence additionally the former search for bliss; but the peace and joy of the spirit that arises from faith remains forever! This life of faith can equally be called the life of will since faith is impervious to how one feels but chooses through volition to obey God’s mind, the spiritual believer may not "feel" like obeying God, even so he wills to obey Him! Precious in God’s sight if we determine to obey His will and mind regardless of the cost to our physical body or soulish feelings! To truly walk by the spirit, we must unite our will to God’s and by such our volition, whereby our decisions and choices are yielded to Him and we no longer act according to self. Self stands in opposition to spiritual life, with self broken down as described above we can truly grow spiritually! Upon arriving at the above yielded, united with God, walk of faith in the spirit, we achieve a restful position and find that all that was lost for the Lord’s sake has been restored! We have gained God, and therefore everything belonging to God as well! Such a child of God has advanced onto a pure ground, he is now qualified to be rightly related to God’s joy. All is for God, and in God, and God is in all as well. Nothing is unto self! Self love has been consigned to death, our single purpose now is to do the will of God. It matters not how we feel, what matters is obeying God! We view everything with God’s eyes, our soul life has been terminated. That which is soulish has been destroyed but that which is spiritual has been established! Having so stated the above, the following are my personal comments and revelations that I received while reading this book and relevant issues that sprang forth as a result... I hope my experiences will benefit and bless the reader. This book has blessed me so richly that words are barely able to describe it! Let me just say that many of my questions were finally answered and witnessed as being the truth by my spirit together with God’s Holy Spirit! Let me just begin with a few examples and the revelations which I received regarding same... Of course when I first came to know the Lord, my time was so very rich with Him, I coveted the time together, (this being while at Jesup , Ga. FPC) and this time was wrought with much emotional interaction with the Lord and intense fellowshipping and joy in Him which I truly loved! When I returned home, I continued in much study and time spent with Him, however much of the truths which I learned in that intense time of study, time with God, and prayer while at Jesup, Ga. began to become realities in my life, they began to start being true life experiences which I physically had to go through and at many times didn’t appreciate for what they were, knowledge of God becoming experiential knowledge of God. After about two years, I began to feel quite dry towards God, of course I went through all the motions, naturally I attended church and studied His Word regularly but something was definitely missing! Most noticeable was the fact that He no longer spoke so loudly to me, making me feel that perhaps I had done something wrong, perhaps I had lost my zeal and therefore had somehow erected walls between God and myself and this caused me much inward pain because I so wanted to burn with the fire I once had when I was first saved! I feared that I had become lukewarm! At some time thereabouts I experienced one or two campmeetings which brought back a fire that I really prayed would stay, however I soon found that the feeling would diminish again and again no matter how hard I tried to maintain the fire going! I was quite resigned to the fact that there was something that I must be doing wrong, somehow I was not being as faithful as God demanded and or had some sin in my life that He could not tolerate and hence the apparent dryness! For this and other reasons I decided to dive head first into organized study of His word and made the commitment to attend Calvary Bible Institute. I felt that most certainly my time in the Word left on my own was insufficient, deeper study and knowledge of Him and His Word was necessary! At this time while attending Holy Spirit 2, my pride was demonstrated when I was passed over to lead a home study group, something I felt at the time was an absolute in my life... Having felt I had arrived somewhere (only God knows where) I was brought back to the real world! Wow, it just so happens that I was praying for God to reveal to me the depth of my deception after having read that wonderful book that Pastor Tom was so moved by... (The name escapes me now and I’m 5000 miles from my copy so we’ll just proceed for now) {The Final Quest - 10/6/98}
Anyway, after reading the book Spiritual Authority by Harold Horton as part of that class, I felt again that I had passed a trial or test and must therefore be something in God’s (and self’s) eyes! However, being so very spiritual, once again I still needed something, Promise Keepers seemed like something, that worked for a while, but what in the world was happening? Now up, then down, on fire now, cold as ice tomorrow... Well, to shorten a lengthy story, after last trip to Africa where I did much study and was very much into God’s Word more than any time since those first days, I found myself at one point writing over and over, page after page the words, "I love You Lord Jesus", over and over, page after page, maybe 19 legal sized pages, front and back! I read His Word cover to cover two times, still I wrote line after line, page after page... Why? I was trying with all my might to return to that place where God was near as He had been , so very hot and up close and personal with me, speaking loudly to me like those first weeks, months even! The one thing I failed to appreciate until now is that all during this time I had developed a habit of speaking to Him in prayer, in depending on Him to help me do ordinary things I’d always done before simply by habit, I had in fact developed a quirky habit (to anyone within earshot) of speaking to Him incessantly. This of course was relatively unnoticed at the time to me, it was just the natural thing I felt led to do. When I returned home after the time away and found the church changed in almost every vestige of what it had been, surprisingly I fell deeper in love with my brethren and the new vision they had received while I was away! Really, it surprised me that I was not the least bothered by the fact that I had been passed over again to lead a group, I even received a witness and very distinctly from the Holy Spirit, that all of my future was in God’s hands! He was in control and I received a peace unspeakable concerning the changes and how they affected me! When I returned home, the Family Altar Ministry was as well changed, but it was not important somehow, it was being done by others, the ministry hadn’t died due to my absence, I truly had no prideful or covetous feelings as I can guarantee I’d have felt if same had been done just 1 year before! Now, I’m sure by now it appears that I am simply rambling, however it all has to do with this book! You see, I was on a journey from "a life of feeling" to "a life of faith"! God was doing a deep work in me that Watchman Nee explains in detail in the final chapters of his second part of this book! What I felt before was much growth in spirituality was in fact deception by my soul and I was quite soulish instead! I still haven’t arrived anywhere, but after the first book I felt very convicted of pride, motives for things I’ve done, and especially of my vainglory! Thank God for this second book, there is reason for me to rejoice, the truth is that somehow, in some minute manner I’ve increased in my spiritual maturity and while not having arrived anywhere, I am quite satisfied to know that I am moving forward towards God’s upward call! God all this time was just trying to wean me off the "feelings" I wanted, needed, had come to expect from Him and was moving me towards truly walking in faith, in trust, in the spirit! Lord, please continue the glorious work You’ve started in this earthen vessel! I eagerly await the unfolding of the last part of the book and the things it surely will reveal to me as I press ever on.

Richard P. Duffield

I pray that somehow this has inspired you, helped you, or at least made you ponder the wonders contained within God's Word! If you made it through this Part 2, make sure to read Part 3! You're almost done and you'll see spiritual growth in Christ as a result! I guarantee that! Please make sure to send comments or suggestions if you have any! They are welcome!
Remember, God doesn't need people who've already arrived, He needs common sinners, saved by His grace, like you and I!

Be blessed!

In His service,

Richard P. Duffield